Recovery.

Dave Farquhar Human Interest ,

I went and saw Emily last night. She was beat up, but not as badly as you’d expect someone who’d been thrown from a car to be. She was still in ICU because they’re worried about her spleen. She was in pretty good spirits considering everything she’d been through in the past 36 hours.
I mentioned to one of my coworkers that I was going to the hospital after work to see a friend in ICU. She said those kinds of visits were hard. I guess they are, but I’ll take an ICU visit over a funeral visitation any day. Maybe it’s hard to know what to say, but I guess I’ve found it doesn’t matter too much. Look at Job. Job lost everything, then was struck with leprosy, so then he went out to the town dump and sat there. His three friends went out there to be with him and spent a week there with him, without a word. Then when they finally did speak, they said, “You idiot!”

During those times, I think it’s good to remember the words of Mark Twain. If God had wanted us to talk more than we listen, he’d have given us one ear and two mouths.

I looked into her eyes and saw someone who’s fighting, but she’s tired, frustrated, and impatient. What I didn’t see was someone at the end of her rope. I could tell she looked into my eyes and saw someone who cared. I didn’t really have to say much else.

When bad things happen to good people…

Dave Farquhar Christianity , ,

When bad things happen to good people. A couple of weeks ago, I got e-mail from a friend I’ll just call by her nickname, Hammer. Hammer moved to upstate New York this summer, after having lived in a small Illinois town outside of St. Louis her whole life. Hammer e-mails her friends a lot, and she’s probably the wordiest and most vocal person I know, myself included. Hammer told me (and others) about a longime friend who’d been going to our church for the past six months, who wanted to join our small group, but didn’t know any of us.
Her story was that of a fairly typical twentysomething Lutheran growing up in the 90s: Didn’t catch every break, made some good decisions and some bad decisions. She was successful, especially considering her age, but maybe a bit lonely. She didn’t have very many Christian friends.

I took it hard. Hammer described this girl, and I was about 99.8% certain I knew who she was talking about. Six months and no one close to her age had talked to her? That’s just wrong. So that night, after Wednesday service, I walked up to her. I didn’t care how uncomfortable it felt. I held out my hand and hoped I wouldn’t sound like a bumbling idiot.

“I’ve seen you around but I’ve never met you,” I said. “I’m Dave.”

She smiled. “I’m Emily,” she said.

My hunch had been right.

I had no idea how to invite her to Bible study, but that was fine. Hammer’s mom was right there. “Emily’s interested in your Bible study,” she said. I waved over to some of my cohorts, who came over. We made some quick introductions. My friend Brenna offered to meet Emily at church and drive with her to our next session, since it was in a part of town she wasn’t familiar with.

The next Friday, she was there. She fit right in. Like I said, her story–at least what I know of it–is virtually interchangeable with mine and with most Christians my age.

I flagged her down the following Sunday. She thanked me for inviting her, and said she’d been a bit nervous at first. She didn’t know what to expect–would she find a Lutheran monestary, or would she find people like her?

“You found people like you, right?” I asked.

She smiled. “I think so.”

“Good,” I said.

I saw her again Wednesday. She mentioned her back had been bothering her that day, and she asked if we were meeting Friday. I said yes. I asked for her e-mail address so I could e-mail her directions.

“Good,” she said. “What’s your phone number?”

I know I gave her a shocked look. She chuckled. “In case I have any questions about the directions,” she said.

I smiled and gave up the digits.

On Friday, my phone rang. No, it wasn’t the Charter cable guy I talked about yesterday. That was later. It was Emily. She told me she’d spent the day on the couch, her back had been acting up, and she wouldn’t be able to make it.

I told her we’d make sure we said a prayer for her.

“I was just about to ask if you would do that for me,” she said. I didn’t get the impression she was used to people volunteering to pray for her. Then I asked if she’d gone to see her doctor. No, she said, because a doctor would just give her pain pills, but she’d been to see a chiropractor. Good answer. She said he took x-rays, and he didn’t do anything else but shock her. She said that helped for a little while but she didn’t know what that was for.

“That’s to stimulate the nerves,” I said. “Once he gets the x-rays, he’ll probably pop you with this springy thing to move some bones back in place.” Those are technical terms, by the way. Well, the only technical terms my simple mind can understand.

“So you’ve been to a chiropractor before?” she asked.

“Oh yeah,” I said. I described the procedures a little more. It’s uncomfortable sometimes but helps. Hopefully I put her mind at ease a little.

“Would you do me another favor?” she asked timidly at the end of the conversation. I thought she was going to ask me to build an addition to her house or something.

“Sure,” I said. (What can I say? I’m a sucker.)

“Would you say a prayer for my brother too? He’s moving, and left today, and I just want him to be safe.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “We’ll do that for you.”

I’ve heard thank-yous that sincere before, but they’re rare.

I prayed for both of them that night. I prayed for her and for her brother right when I hung up the phone, then later during the Bible study. That night, before I went to bed, I prayed again. I asked for her to be up and around on Saturday.

Sunday morning, I heard the answer to that prayer. We got to the point in the service when we pray, and one of our Seminary students led the prayers. He included Emily. “That’s nice,” I thought. Then I heard the rest–“Emily, who was in a car accident early this morning.”

Details were sketchy. My phone rang later yesterday afternoon with more details. She’d seen her chiropractor Saturday and had been feeling much better, so she went out. “Early” meant much closer to midnight than 8. She rolled her car and spent some time in ICU.

But she was alive. That was the important thing.

The answers did nothing but raise more questions. Why this? Why now? What did I accomplish by praying for her?

I don’t have any answers. At least not any good ones.

Obviously, the evil one sees her as a threat. Seeing as he’s seen 12 billion different people and has a long memory, something in her rang a little too familiar, he saw an opportunity to take her out, and he tried.

God could have prevented it by keeping her on the couch one more day. I don’t know why He didn’t. He didn’t have to say yes to our requests as quickly as He did.

I could spend all day second-guessing Him like I second-guess Joe Torre and Bob Brenly. It wouldn’t accomplish anything productive. It’s better to look to Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 8, verse 28 instead. It reads: “In all things God works for the good of those who love Him.”

Including car crashes.

What good can come from this? She’s about to find out what she’s made of. She’s likely to reach deep down and find something she never knew she had.

Why do bad things happen to good people? For the same reason bad things happen to bad people–bad things happen to everyone. They usually seem to make bad people worse, and good people better.

Telephones and World Series

Dave Farquhar Baseball , , , , , ,

Cable guy. My phone rang Friday night.
“Hi, this is [I didn’t catch the name] from Charter, the cable company. How are you doing tonight?”

I knew I should have forked over the extra bucks for privacy guard. “I’d be a whole lot better if you’d take me off your calling list,” I said.

“You don’t even want to hear about our special offers?” he asked.

“Nope. I don’t watch TV,” I said.

He sounded disbelieving. “You don’t watch TV?”

“Nope.”

“You mean to tell me you haven’t watched one second of TV today?”

“Right.” I hadn’t. Actually I hadn’t watched one second of TV since I fell asleep during the playoffs and was rudely awakened by Frank Sinatra singing “New York” at high volume after the Yankees steamrolled the Mariners. Disgusted, I turned off the boob tube (that’s all it shows during the commercials) and went to bed.

“What are you doing now?” he asked.

“Getting ready to go out.”

“Oh, you’re going to a party or something?”

Close enough. “Yep.”

“Oh. Sorry to bother you, sir.” And he hung up.

This is the one time of year I do watch TV. That’s World Series time. Unless it’s Yankees-Braves, in which case I have more important things to do, like clean my toenails. My phone rang last night right after Curt Schilling plunked Derek Jeter. “That’s my phone,” I muttered to no one. “Don’t they know better than to bother me during the World Series?” No one answered. I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

Whoever it was must have wised up. There was no one there. Good thing. If it’d been the cable guy again, I’d have had to tell him it’s not worth $35 a month just to be able to watch seven baseball games with a clearer picture.

A few random World Series observations:

Yeah, I know Curt Schilling beat the Cards, and I wanted a Cardinals-Mariners series. Even still, he’s one cool guy. He doesn’t care who sees him praying just before each start, and he bought a ticket for his dad, who died in 1988 and never saw him pitch in the big leagues, for this game. Having lost my dad at a similar age, I empathize. And he’s just a class act. At the end of the game, as his teammates were coming off the field, he ran out to give them handshakes and hugs. Starting pitchers almost never do that. I have to root for him. Baseball needs more good men like Curt Schilling.

Baseball also desperately needs another commissioner like Bart Giamati. Is it just me, or is baseball commissioner Bud Selig the worst public speaker in the history of public speaking? It really bothered me that he had to refer to a script to present Barry Bonds with his worthless Commissioner’s Historic Achievement Award or whatever it’s called. Selig’s speech could be summed up as, “Barry, you had a fantastic season, taking a record that once belonged to Babe Ruth, Roger Maris, and Mark McGwire, joining the ranks of three of the greatest sluggers of all time, while also having one of the greatest all-around offensive seasons of all time. It’s my pleasure to present you with this award, previously awarded to McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn. Congratulations.” But it took him what seemed like several torturous hours to say that. What I just wrote isn’t particularly eloquent, but compared to Selig’s speech, it’s practically Shakespearean.

At any rate, I was happy to see Arizona win. I can’t root for the Yankees. Used to be the only team I disliked more than the Yankees was the Mets. But if the Mets were playing the Yankees, I’d have to root for the Mets just because they aren’t the Yankees. Yeah, I know, that sounds un-American this year. But two people I respect–one of whom I respect so much, his picture hangs in a frame in my living room, across from a picture of Abraham Lincoln–feel exactly the same way.

So here’s to Arizona. And to the American League, who next season will hopefully put the Yankees in their proper place.

Fifth.

Linux and PC cubes

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

PC cubes! Yes, I want a cube-shaped computer, because it’s small. No, I don’t want one made by Apple, or an obsolete NeXT (I used those in college when I couldn’t get time on an SGI). I want something small and cheap, and if it’s reasonably good looking, that’s a bonus.
Enter the Shuttle SV24.

Unlike Apple’s cube, it has a brushed-alumninum case, so it won’t crack. Just like Apple’s cube, it generates extreme reactions, and not everyone who likes Apple’s cube likes Shuttle’s.

I admit, it doesn’t have Apple’s styling. But I like Lian-Li’s styling a lot better. I wouldn’t put this in Lian-Li’s league either. But it’s certainly no uglier than any of the PCs I own now, and it’s small and light. So yeah, it has me thinking.

Where can you get one? Two of my favorite vendors have it, at a price of $250: Newegg.com and Mwave.com.

I also saw on Ars’ forums that MSI makes a slimline PC called the 6215. Newegg has it (search for “6215”) for $210. It’s tiny, but has two PCI slots and is more conventional-looking. I’m thinking the 6215 would be great for a server appliance, seeing as it has two PCI slots so you could put a SCSI card in it. You could also disable the onboard Realtek NIC and replace it with a card like an Intel EtherExpress Pro that uses less CPU time.

More Linux. The biggest thing holding me back from migrating to SupaSite is its requirement of the Apache, MySQL and PHP trio. I’ve tried to get those three to work together before, and the setup wasn’t exactly trivial, especially when trying to do it from RPMs. It looks like it’d be a whole lot easier to just compile it yourself. But this past week I found Apache Toolbox, which downloads the source for those three, plus bunches of Apache modules and compiles them for you. It sounds like it even helps out with configuration. I’ve gotta give this one a shot.

Country clubs revisited

Dave Farquhar Christianity

Country club churches. I had a conversation with my good friend Brad about country-club Christianity. We didn’t come up with any great answers but I think we took a couple of good steps. What’s not being in a country club look like? Talking to strangers, that’s what. And I think I know what the last line of the conversation should be. Not, “Nice to meet you.” Your mama taught you to say that, because it’s polite. It’s what everyone expects to hear. You shouldn’t say that. You should be rude. I think those last words should be, “I’m glad you were here.”
And you better be glad he or she was there, because God is.
Now, here comes the important part: follow-up. Remember that person’s name. Pray for that person during the next week. Make sure you pray for the chance to see that person again. If you didn’t care about that person on Sunday, I guarantee you will after you pray for ’em for a week. Then, on the next Sunday, find that person again and make sure you say something. I don’t think you should necessarily tell that person you’ve been praying for him or her. It seems to make people nervous.

I don’t know how the conversation should go. You figure it out. You’ve made friends before. But I still think you should be rude and close with the line, “I’m glad you were here.”

And don’t forget the follow-up. And if the person’s not there next Sunday? Find another stranger. But don’t forget the first one.

Neither Brad nor I have any idea what will happen if a lot of people start doing this. But I know nothing bad will come of it.

Something else. Tomorrow I want to talk about Linux some more. And I want to talk about cubes. Cubicles at work? No. Apple Cubes? Not exactly. I saw one of these yesterday and I want one, so chances are it isn’t from Apple.

OK, OK, yeah, this is bugging me…

Dave Farquhar General

I’ve been avoiding the subject. Time to quit. I wrote this last night, then I found a good way to crash a Linux box (a good electrical storm does the trick) and lost it.
Has anyone else noticed that you’re more likely to find someone to talk to you, listen to you, and understand you in a bar than in a church?

That bugs me because I’m supposed to be one of those guys you come to for those three things, and I take a whole lot more than I give in that area. People my age just don’t come, because when they do, everyone acts like they’re not there. Yours Truly included, because I’m up in the loft, behind a pair of keyboards and monitors or a video camera, too busy making sure the right images are projected up on the screen. I’m too busy pursuing some ideal called “Excellence in Worship” to have any time for a stranger.
So, we so-called “leaders” just huddle, comfortable in our little clique, marveling at the 50 people joining our congregation next month, completely oblivious to our hundreds of inactives and people who visited, then decided to go find somewhere else to get their needs met. Hopefully they went to another church. Chances are a good number of them decided they’re just as well off staying out later on Saturday nights.

So I’m mad. Mad at myself as much as anyone. But something has to change. It doesn’t matter how excellent your service looks when the sanctuary’s only half full.

Webshots and Weatherbug, away with you!

Dave Farquhar War Stories, Windows ,

The bane of the NT administrator’s existence banished. I had a problem last week with a user who was complaining about lockups. I went and looked at the system, and it turned out not to be lockups at all–the system was running out of CPU cycles, so it appeared to lock up, but if you let it sit long enough, it would recover. The system had so many user-installed toys, such as Webshots and Weatherbug and RealAudio and RealJukebox, that it didn’t have enough punch left to do real work. I disabled the toys, to many objections, and told the user to call me if the system had any more problems. I told her that yeah, the way I set up computers is drab and boring and utilitarian, but they work.
Supposedly Windows NT won’t allow regular users to install software. In reality, they can install a lot.

Here’s the trick. Open regedt32 (not regedit) and navigate to HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun. Go to Security. The All Users group has special access. Change that to read-only access.

We did that at work on one machine, then logged in with a non-priveliged account, and we must have been the first people in history who had problems installing Webshots and Weatherbug.
Some programs may install anyway, though they fail to write the run key. But in order for them to start up, the user will have to drag the executable to their personal startup group. Most of the users who install this garbage don’t know how to do that.
Hard drive first aid. I had an external Mac SCSI hard drive that was acting up. I was able to get it to run once, for about 5 minutes. From then on, when you powered up, it would just seek incessantly. Stiction, I hoped–though it’s unusual for stiction to set in while a drive is actually running. I shut it down and let it rest. No improvement.

My normal cure for stiction is to blow-dry it to heat it up above operating temperature to loosen the oil. Lacking a blow dryer, I resorted to something I really don’t like to do. Well, since this was a Mac peripheral, I didn’t really care. And I made a pretty big show of it. I held the drive about six inches off the floor. “I’m gonna do it!” I said. My coworkers looked up. I released the drive, sending it hurtling to the floor. The force of the impact knocked the front of the enclosure loose.

“You’re recalibrating it?” someone asked.

I grinned, picked up the drive, snapped the front cover back on, and plugged it in. The drive ran. I copied the data off to another drive. It was a bit slow–this isn’t a healthy drive–but it copied. And the drive ran all day, to my amazement.

Incoming links: http://gsw.edu/~oiit/techsupp/software.html

Linux thin clients

Dave Farquhar General

Finally, a complete tutorial on doing Linux thin clients! Colin Mattoon over at LinuxWorld has written a reasonably complete, understandable tutorial that would allow you to make a usable Linux computer lab out of an applications server (anything over 600 MHz would do) and a pile of obsolete PCs. I’ve seen many of these over the years; this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone explain enough for you to create something useful without looking 47 other places for information.
It’s a five-parter that I’ve been following since inception; I don’t agree with the order they’ve been posted but they’re deep enough into the series now that you can read in whatever order you want.

See the latest installment.

Some proper, original content will follow later.

An easy DIY mailserver

Dave Farquhar Christianity , , , , ,

Mail the easy way. It figures that I would find this now, after blowing most of a Saturday trying to get a mailserver set up. This won’t give you any nifty spam filtering, but if you want a fast, reliable, secure, mail server with every other nifty feature you could want, run to Qmail the Easy Way. There, you can download a script that goes and gets all the sources you need and compiles them for you. You get Qmail for SMTP (the fastest and most secure mail server available for Linux), Courier IMAP and POP for receiving, DJBDNS for name resolution, and a nifty Webmail interface. Combine that with your favorite Linux-from-sources distro, and you’ll have a rock-solid, fast-as-possible mail server for a whole lot less money than an Exchange server. And the hardware requirements are far lower. Dan Bernstein, the author of Qmail and DJBDNS, claims Red Hat used a 486 to test Qmail and it performed so well they just threw it into production.
If I had a lot of IMAP clients connecting I know I’d want a Pentium-class machine, but I remember back in the day running Domino under OS/2 on Pentium-90s. When we moved to Domino on NT running on a 533 MHz Alpha, it made our heads spin because we thought 90 MHz was good enough. This was with about 200 people connecting to it. This qmail setup would be a whole lot more efficient than Domino running under NT.

And if you want it all? All you’re missing (possibly) is fetchmail for grabbing mail from foreign mailservers, procmail for a filtering language, and a spamfilter package.
Incidentally, Bernstein writes highly secure, highly efficient software, and he’s really dictatorial about what changes go in it. That’s partly because he guarantees its security–he’ll pay you $5,000 if you can compromise it and he can replicate what you did. Yes, it’s open source, and he gives it away, but since you can’t modify it unconditionally, the BSD people hate him. And since you can’t do anything you want with it except close it, Stallman and his FSF hate him. Since I try to offend the BSD and FSF zealots any time I can, I think that would be reason enough to use Bernstein’s software, assuming it was capable. But it’s not just capable. It’s smaller, faster, and more secure than any alternative and he’s even willing to warrant it–something the likes of Microsoft and Oracle will never do–and you can compile it on any architecture with whatever optimizations you want, and it’s free, so I say you and I are fools not to be using it.

Time to be offensive. It’s been a really long time since I’ve offended people by talking about religion. I was talking with one of my good friends from church (and another part of the conversation reminded me that if I ever decide I want to try to make a living by writing, I need to offer him a job as beg him to be my agent) and we were talking about God’s will. His son had been having some problems, and he was questioning his attitude a little. I understand. My attitude would be similar, and I’d be questioning it afterward too.

I don’t remember what he said, but I paraphrased it back to him to see if I understood what he meant: “I ask for God’s will, but I admit that a lot of times I’m afraid of what God’s will is, and that it might be different from mine.”

“Perfectly said,” he said. (He always says I state things perfectly. I’d better not ever read him that e-mail I wrote at around 9:30 on Wednesday that I’ve been regretting ever since…)

“I know where you’re coming from,” I said. “I’m afraid of it too, most of the time.”

He stopped for a minute and asked if that was OK. I thought about it for a minute. It’s definitely natural to want something different from what God wants. And if you think you might be wrong but want to be right, sure, you’ll be afraid of God’s will. And that’s certainly preferable to being hostile to God’s will, insisting on your way or the highway. You have to reach a certain level of maturity to be willing to ask God’s will, even when you’re afraid of it.

But that’s not all there is. God will take that if it’s all He can get, but what God really wants is unconditional surrender. The Lord’s Prayer says, “Thy will be done.” No strings attached. Jesus prayed, “If it’s possible, take this away from me. But not my will, but Yours be done.” No strings attached there either.
One of us cited Abraham as the human who got as close to that ideal as is humanly possible. But I pointed out how Abraham got there. For 99 years of his life, Abraham didn’t trust God completely, and he did things on his own. At least twice he felt his life was in danger, and he lied to protect his skin and nearly forced his wife into adultery in so doing. We can look back and say, “Abraham! God said he’d make you a great nation! You’re sitting there childless, and Sarah’s not pregnant yet either. Are you a great nation yet? No way! And God’s at least 9 months away from being able to deliver on that promise. You know what, Abraham? You’re invincible! Those guys could try to kill you and they absolutely would fail.” But we’ve got the advantage of hindsight.

At some point, Abraham must have looked back over his life and come to that conclusion himself. Because by the time he was about 110, he unconditionally did anything and everything God told him to do.

I’m convinced that Abraham became the superhero of faith by looking back over his life objectively and being observant enough to see God’s hand in everything, and being far enough along in years to be able to see a whole lot of God’s work, and see that God’s way was good, better than anything he could have possibly put together on his own.

So yeah, I feel bad about being 26 and attaching strings to my surrender. I’ve got a whole book of God’s made-and-kept promises, and I have read the whole thing, cover to cover. But nothing’s more convincing than your own experience, and at 26 I’ve still got some of that to gain. He’s further along than I am in the experience department and in the miracles department–he’s got two kids that no doctor can explain. The second is less than a year old, but if he’s like a cat and has nine lives, he’s already used up two or three.

Hopefully neither of us needs a whole lot more convincing. I think we’ll both get there before we turn 110, but I’m not surprised that neither of us is there yet.